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It’s nearly the time of year for the first wave of tortoises to leave hibernation and head for warmer climates. I am of course being my usual grumpy self where these, in my humble opinion, menaces of the UK’s roads are concerned. What am I talking about? Caravans.
I’ve never understood why people would want to crawl along towing almost their entire home with them round some of the smallest and most crowded roads and lanes in the country.
There are plenty of perfectly good B&B’s looking for your business, or alternatively there are sites all over the country that have static caravans or park homes if you really must stay in a home from home.
The wonderment continues when you watch these cumbersome things being towed in all directions. People from the North heading South and vice versa, or West to East and so on. Why the hell don’t these people just leave them at home and rent one from someone heading the opposite direction? Surely with all the clubs involved in encouraging this sort of activity, someone somewhere could have created a database of available swaps. They could even just make it so you towed yours the short distance from your own front door to the nearest site for the season and then headed off in your unburdened vehicle to somewhere lovely.
The thing is, these things aren’t cheap. They cost on average £15k – £27k for something that will sit on your drive deteriorating for most of the year in most cases. Add to that the additional cost of fuel to tow them. and the fact that most owners will have to have a much larger car than they need for 90% of the year just so they can tow them and I am completely at a loss to understand it.
Bailey, the UK’s oldest manufacturer of leisure caravans, or Swift, the largest UK manufacturer, sell an astonishing number of new caravans each year, and the market is growing at about 7% a year. The whole market including static vans and motorhomes rose about 20% in 2017. *Why people are buying more caravans.
I was so happy when the trailer test became law in the UK. I just wished it had been retrospective because it would quite possibly have wiped 50% of caravans off the road in one fell swoop because there are so many people who literally have no idea how to tow or manoeuvre their combination of car and trailer.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not totally against caravans. There are plenty of instances where temporary accommodation is indeed useful and necessary. Take a competition of some sort that is held in a rural area with no hotels or B&B’s. I genuinely don’t have a problem with the use of caravans for this. My problem is with the holiday brigade who clog the arteries of the country for months on end when they could just stay on permanent sites.
The idea that you can “park anywhere” with a caravan just isn’t true. You are able to park in a layby next to a busy road, (but who in their right mind want’s to do that?) or sometimes in more rural areas, there might be a quiet spot but the likelihood is that there’ll be signs saying “No overnight parking” or similar. So, then you’re limited to touring sites. I can’t think of many farmers who’d be pleased to find you’d opened a gate and pulled into their fields.
As a keen wild camper, I always drop into farms and ask permission to camp. It’s common decency and in my experience, farmers are very pleased you’ve asked and will even help by suggesting good spots. I couldn’t begin to imagine doing this with a caravan in tow.
I once had to reverse a car and large caravan back down a country lane because I had been trying to get down the road for over 15 minutes and each time I tried, another tortoise came up it. In the end and in total frustration I flatly refused to reverse yet again to a passing place (And that’s another s thing, passing places, why the hell do they have to have signs designating them?) and when I told the driver of the combination that I was happy to abandon my car and walk to my destination, they told me that they couldn’t reverse. It wasn’t that they couldn’t for some physical reason, just that they had no idea how to. So in I hopped and did it for them. That driver should never have had a licence that allowed them to tow, and I’ll bet they still tow, and still can’t reverse.
I learned to tow trailers on farms before I even had a car licence, and then over the years have towed caravans and hugely long glider trailers, but I’m happy to say that I have never knowingly held people up or got stuck in a country lane. I used to pull over if I had even a few cars behind me because I like to treat others as I’d like to be treated.
So, in conclusion, I implore you if you are one of the many tortoise brigade members, make sure that you know how to tow, and more importantly, be aware of those other road users who may well be trying to get to work, or take someone to hospital etc. Have a little courtesy and pull in once in a while. You just might see happy motorists who give you a friendly wave instead of them seeing the red mist and trying some suicidal manoeuvre to get past you.